Pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupt former prime minister’s speech, week after similar incident in Chicago. Woman identified as a Jew shouts at him, ‘No more genocide in my name’
Last week the Dow added 1.3%, the S&P 1.5%, the Russell 2000, 0.2% and the Nasdaq 100, 0.7%. Cyclicals rose 2.6%; transports 3.8%; consumers 1.7%; utilities 1.3%, as banks fell 0.3% and broker/dealers fell 0.6%. High tech fell 0.2% semis 1.1%; bitoechs 1.9% and Internets rose 0.2%. Gold bullion rose $3.00 and the HUI was unchanged, but up 47.5% on the year. The USDX, the dollar index fell 1.1% to 75.62.
The 2-year T-bills fell 2 bps to 0.83%, the 10-year notes rose 2 bps to 3.41% and the 10-year German bund added 8 bps to 3.28%.
Freddie Mac 30-year fixed rate mortgages rose 5 bps to 4.92%; the 15’s rose 4 bps to 4.37% and the one-year ARMs jumped 7 bps to 4.60%. The 30-year fixed jumbo fell 6 bps to 6.00%.
Federal Reserve credit declined $12.9 billion, up 21% yoy. Fed foreign holdings of Treasury/Agency debt rose $4.1 billion to a record $2.865 trillion. Custody holdings for foreign central banks expanded at a 17.5% rate ytd, and yoy 15.2%.
M-2 narrow money supply fell $23.3 billion to $8.341 trillion, that is 5.9% yoy.
Total money market assets dropped $42.3 billion to $3.404 trillion. They have declined $427 billion ytd, or 14.1% annualized.
The charade in NYC and Washington goes on. There is no question that our government is controlled by the unelected that lurks behind the scenes or are appointed as bureaucrats to run our country. It was never more evident than when administrations changed last January. Team A replaced Team B, all of whom just happen to be members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group. There is no debate. There is only one plan and that is for one-world government. These are the Illuminists who will Shepard us into final bondage. This is what our government is all about today and has been since WWII.
The heart of the elitist control mechanism is the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. Control of our country emanates from these two entities. They control the purse strings of our nation. They allow us to pay for our own destruction. This is achieved by taxation and debt. The system in place has been used for centuries to keep control over people. The elitists want total power over us and all the inhabitants of the world.
Their plans to bring down the world’s economic and financial structure is well underway. The problem is that the public has begun to discover what they are up too via talk radio, the Internet and publications such as the International Forecaster. That has caused the elitists to accelerate their plans and that has opened the window of opportunity for us.
This is why now it is the appropriate time to pass HR1207 and SB604, bills to audit and investigate the Federal Reserve. Once the public discovers what these elitists have been doing to the American people for almost a century, they will disband the Fed and turn its job of monetary policy back to the Treasury where it was placed by our Constitution. This way we will have control and transparency. The next step will be to close the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington.
t has been two years since the beginning of the credit crisis and the breakdown of our economic and financial structure. The plan by the elitists since then has been to keep the system functioning as long as possible so that they can continue their massive frauds and corruption; or until the time is ripe to allow the system to collapse. These plans are ably assisted by 95% of our House and Senate who are bought and paid for. The corruption is so widespread that investigations do not take place and the guilty are protected and at worst pay a fine.
Due to these machinations the America we have known is gone. Our country is run by thugs in $3,000 suits with Ivy League degrees.
Most Americans do not understand what is going on or don’t care to know. Most are ill-educated and do not really and a chance of comprehending what is going on. That is compounded by drugs and alcohol and a steady stream of media propaganda and brainwashing produced by NYC and Washington. Our daughter teaches the fourth grade and 20 of 23 students are not passing. They are split three ways: white, black and Spanish speaking. Then there is no ‘Child Left Behind,’ which will make sure they pass summer school and when they graduate they will be functionally illiterate. It doesn’t get much worse than this. When we went to school one or maybe two out of 30 wouldn’t pass and they were kept back for a year. It is outrageous. They spend all their time studying for federal government mandated tests, and learn little else. Our three grandchildren read one to four extra books a week and fortunately really excel in their studies. It can be done, but it takes lots of work and dedication something that most parents do not have time for. This in part is what is responsible for America’s failure and lack of leadership. Leadership, which is totally in the hands of the wealthy Illuminists. If it is any consolation the rest of the world isn’t doing much better.
The geniuses, the masters of the universe, have a broken system. This time the system they have deliberately destroyed cannot be resurrected. Due to talk radio, the Internet and publications such as the IF they had to accelerate their program for on-world government and they are scrambling, hoping they’ll be successful, and unscathed. We will make sure they’ll be no chance of that.
As a result of these machinations America is at the mercy of its creditors and for all intents and purposes is bankrupt. The only thing left holding America together is its imperial armies that eventually will collapse for lack of funding. Foreigners are not going to stand for monetization indefinitely. Yes, the players know the system has failed, and some have already broken ranks. If they had not Forex assets in sovereign reserves would not have fallen from 64.5% to 62.8% over the past nine months, as proof of that.
We have told you where we have been headed over and over again for more than ten years and we have been almost totally right unfortunately. If we do not stop these monsters we and our ancestors will live in bondage for ever. That is why passage of HR1207 and SB604 are so important. We have to drive a stake through the heart of the Illuminist machine. That heart is the Fed. If we are unsuccessful we are doomed to chaos and perhaps revolution. Americans had best wake up and snap out of denial.
Most analysts try to figure out what others within the financial and economic sphere are doing. Unfortunately they are burdened by playing within the system. They cannot see what is really going on because for one reason or another they are forced to frame their results within the inner sanctum of the Illuminists. This is the cover that is used for deliberately destroying nations. These ideas cannot simply be avoided. You would think reading history that all these brilliant people wouldn’t be deceived, but they have been. Every time, what they are doing has been tried, has been a failure. Deliberate collapses, destroyed currencies, social chaos and revolution. During the French Revolution 300,000 people such as these lost their heads. Perhaps this time it will be 3 million. Inflation can only be controlled by deflation and deflation is totally uncontrollable. Misguided isn’t the word for it. Smug and arrogant they’ll again be proven wrong and unfortunately we will all pay a terrible price.
The progenitors of this false economic policy, Keynesianism, have brought the distortion of price mechanisms, created unlimited opportunities for speculation and they have thrown all discipline to the wind. This is the basis for our current Federal Reserve System, which is the engine for such a philosophy. As a result of this policy we will be entering hyperinflation next year and the dollar will continue to fall in value.
Even though gold and silver are suppressed, gold hit a new high this past week. The CRB index did as well with oil leading the way. This is all a manifestation of coming hyperinflation and a falling dollar.
The Keynesians are pumping the money supply and monetizing domestic and foreign debt at a wild pace. The deflationary undertow continues strong as residential and commercial property prices continue their decent. The final impact is still two or more years away.
There are few financial reports that do not include bogus accounting. The FASB changed the rules last year and allowed mark-to-model accounting. Let’s see if they reinstate mark-to-market January 1st. The Basel Accords have been simply ignored and no one discusses them. Exclusive of present on and off balance sheet losses, banks are going to get hit with more residential foreclosure losses and they will be hit by 35% more commercial losses over the next two years. If nothing else the banks cannot refinance perfectly good loans because they do not have the funds to do so.
The big question for the banks is will the government perpetuate this fraud? We do not know, but we rather think they may for the good of the country. If fraud continues it will be for the benefit of Illuminists who run the banks, brokerage houses, insurance companies and transnational conglomerates. Either way again all they are doing is buying time; the end result will be the same. The banking, brokerage and insurance businesses are still broke. Nothing has been done to fix the underlying problem. There have been no structural changes, just the same old criminality. Any changes are patchwork for the public. Stimulus packages, home loan modification and $250 checks for seniors who will not get a COLA increase for the next three years. It is like the mad hatter has been set loose.
Where are the tariffs on goods and services we so desperately need to bring production and jobs back from the third world? Without them everything else is futile. Offshore tax-free earnings, now some $1.3 trillion, are too juicy for the Illuminists to give up. Then again, what better way to destroy an economy, as we wrote in 1967 in the American Mercury?
Then there is the outrageous scam of terrorism and mindless, endless war to again fill the coffers of the Illuminists and rid the world of useless eaters.
Monetization only makes matters much worse, as we shall see when hyperinflation revisits us next year. In this process the dollar is allowed to collapse and it was planned that way.
Borrowers have sold more than $1 trillion in US corporate bonds in 2009, the fastest pace on record. Citigroup and General Electric were the year’s biggest issuers. Sales compare with $873.2 billion in all of 2008, and $1.17 trillion for 2007, the biggest year for bond sales.
The record rally in the price of loans owed by the riskiest corporate borrowers may end a two- year drought in leveraged buyouts. Banks provided almost $7.5 billion of high-yield loans in the U.S. and Europe since July 1 to finance acquisitions, more than double the amount in the three months ended June 30 and more than four times the figure in the first quarter.
Central banks flush with record reserves are increasingly snubbing dollars in favor of euros and yen, further pressuring the greenback after its biggest two-quarter rout in almost two decades. Policy makers boosted foreign currency holdings by $413 billion last quarter, the most since at least 2003, to $7.3 trillion. Nations reporting currency breakdowns put 63% of the new cash into euros and yen in April, May and June, the latest Barclays Capital data show. That’s the highest percentage in any quarter with more than an $80 billion increase. World leaders are acting on threats to dump the dollar while the Obama administration shows a willingness to tolerate a weaker currency in an effort to boost exports and the economy. The diversification signals that the currency won’t rebound anytime soon after losing 10.3% on a trade-weighted basis the past six months, the biggest drop since 1991.
US foreclosure filings climbed to a record in the third quarter according to RealtyTrac Inc. A total of 937,840 homes received a default or auction notice or were repossessed by banks, a 23% increase from a year earlier.
The Chicago Transit Authority proposed service cuts and boosting some bus and train fares 33% to close a $300 million budget gap prompted by pension obligations and the weak economy.
The volume of delinquent commercial mortgages jumped sevenfold last month as borrowers who got loans with lax terms fail to make debt payments amid sinking real estate values, according to Credit Suisse Group AG. In September, installments on $22.4 billion of mortgages were at least 60 days late, up from $3.2 billion a year earlier. The delinquency rate rose 33 bps to 3.34%.
Even as the economy continues to struggle, much of Wall Street is minting money — and looking forward again to hefty bonuses.
Many Americans wonder how this can possibly be. How can some banks be prospering so soon after a financial collapse, even as legions of people worry about losing their jobs and their homes?
It may come as a surprise that one of the most powerful forces driving the resurgence on Wall Street is not the banks but Washington. Many of the steps that policy makers took last year to stabilize the financial system — reducing interest rates to near zero, bolstering big banks with taxpayer money, guaranteeing billions of dollars of financial institutions’ debts — helped set the stage for this new era of Wall Street wealth.
You can’t make up stuff like this! Facing jeers over outlandish pay, the CEO of Goldman Sachs stresses the social goods of his firm's business.
Blankfein, speaking at a breakfast conversation hosted by Fortune, emphasized that the investment firm serves "an important social purpose" by channeling pools of money held by pension funds and others to companies and governments around the world…
But Blankfein said principal trading -- trades the firm makes for its own account -- makes up just a small fraction of Goldman's profits. [Perhaps Blankfein needs remedial math.]
How can Blankfein make such an absurd claim when in the last quarter $10B of Goldie’s $12.4B in revenue came from trading? Obviously Blankfein believes people are stupid given his statement that Goldies principal trading makes up a small fraction of Goldie’s profits. What a crock! And Al Capone used to run soup kitchens.
Borrow from the Federal Reserve at zero and lend to Treasury for a profit. That's some racket. The banks have no incentive to lend. Most of them still have a significant amount of bad loans sitting on their books that they don't want to recognize as nonperforming. If the banks recognize these bad loans, all the write-offs may force them into bankruptcy. Instead, they hope that over time renegotiated loan terms will eventually allow the borrowers to make their payments. This ordeal could last at least a decade if this cycle is similar to other crises, like Japan's lost decade of the 1990s…banks can earn a huge spread by borrowing virtually unlimited amounts for nothing and lending that same money back to the Treasury.
Source: The International Forecaster
The March 14, 2004 robbery most likely came about because the Sheriff's Department discovered that Locklear had cashed a large check to pay workers on his 400-acre farm before heading for a motorcycle rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And that assault differed only in detail from similar outrages taking place every single day in the purported Land of the Free.
A common scene in an occupied land: Just your friendly neighborhood JBT, chillin' outside a really tricked-out armored vehicle. 
Den of thieves: 
At least in California where security guards from Los Angeles to San Francisco have made up their own laws regarding photography in public places
Earlier this year, it was security guards at the U.S. Bank in Los Angeles, which is the tallest building west of the Mississippi River.
This week, it was security guards at 555 California Street, the second tallest building in San Francisco.
After hearing the usual story of security guard harassment and intimidation from a photographer name JohnM.brasia, photographer Troy Holden and another photographer decided to check it out for themselves.
Within a few moments several security guards greeted us with wagging fingers and walkie-talkies.
No photography, they stated clearly. Why, we responded. Safety, they said.
I decided to challenge this statement and the older of the bunch (left) asked me if I wanted to be punched in the face. No, I replied, I have to go back to work and a black eye would make things awkward for me. He then asked me how I would feel if he broke my camera. I told him I would be bummed, but that I needed an upgrade and if he touched me or my camera I would seek monetary legal action to the extent of a brand new Canon 5D Mark II
Holden then sent an email to someone at the top, complaining of the incident. He received the following response from Fatima Vegas who works on the security team for Voranado Reality, the company that manages the property:
“Thank you for your e-mail. I just received information from the incident within the past hour. I am investigating the matter. This is not typical of our security team at 555 California St. If our investigation results in the officer behaving in an unprofessional manner, he will be disciplined accordingly. We do not tolerate that sort of behavior from any of our service providers.”
He should be fired and maybe even investigated by police. Hopefully Troy keeps up with this incident, ensuring the guard no longer is able to make physical threats.
A silent battle has been raging right under our noses, a fierce underground struggle pitting the U.S. against one of its closest allies. For all its newsworthiness, the media has barely noticed the story – except when it surfaces, briefly, like a giant fin jutting above the waves. The aggressor in this war is the state of Israel, with the U.S., its sponsor and protector, playing defense. This is the dark side of the "special relationship" – a battle of spy vs. spy.
Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard – now serving a life sentence – stole secrets so vital that an attempt by the Israelis to get him pardoned was blocked by a massive protest from the intelligence and defense communities. Bill Clinton wanted to trade Pollard for Israeli concessions in the ongoing "peace process," and he was only prevented from doing so by a threat of mass resignations by the top leadership of the intelligence community.
The reason for their intransigence: among the material Pollard had been asked by his Israeli handlers to steal was the U.S. attack plan against the Soviet Union. According to Seymour Hersh, then-CIA director Bill Casey claimed Tel Aviv handed over the information to Moscow in exchange for relaxation of travel restrictions on Soviet Jews, who were then allowed to emigrate to Israel.
The Pollard case is emblematic – but it was just the beginning of a years-long effort by U.S. counterintelligence to rid themselves of the Israeli incubus. Law enforcement was – and presumably still is – convinced Pollard was very far from alone, and that a highly placed "mole" had provided him with key information. In his quest to procure very specific information, Pollard knew precisely which documents to look for – knowledge he couldn’t access without help from someone very high in government circles.
In addition, the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a phone conversation between an Israeli intelligence officer and his boss in Tel Aviv, during which they discussed how to get hold of a letter by then-secretary of state Warren Christopher to Yasser Arafat. The Washington spy suggested they use "Mega," but his boss demurred: "This is not something we use Mega for," he averred.
The search for Mega and his underlings continues to this day, as U.S. counterintelligence attempts to rip up what appears to be a vast Israeli spy operation by its very deep roots. That’s why they went after Ben Ami Kadish, who handed over U.S. secrets to Tel Aviv and shared a handler with Pollard, and why they indicted Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two top officials of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. That’s why they were listening on the other end as Jane Harman promised an Israeli agent to intervene in the Rosen-Weissman case. And now a new front has been opened up in this subterranean war with the arrest of Stewart David Nozette, a top U.S. scientist who worked for the Pentagon, had access to the most closely guarded nuclear secrets, and was the lead scientist in the search for water on the moon.
Nozette’s case is interesting because of his impressive resume: he held top positions with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and NASA, and he served on the White House National Space Council under George H.W. Bush. From 1989 until March 2006, he held "Q" clearance, which means he had access to "critical nuclear weapon design information" and vital information concerning 20 "special access programs" – secrets only a very few top government officials had knowledge of.
In other words, this wasn’t just some mid-level schmuck who wanted to sell out his country for cash: he was one of the big boys – the principal author of the Clementine biostatic radar experiment, which allowed U.S. scientists to discover water on the moon – a kind of J. Robert Oppenheimer figure, whose singular contributions to the U.S. space program and its military applications granted him security clearances available to a very select few.
The affidavit in support of the criminal complaint [.pdf] alleging espionage is terse, vague in parts, and brimming with implication. Taking their cues from the Department of Justice press release, most news reports state, "The complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf committed any offense under U.S. laws," leaving out the last three words in the DOJ’s sentence: "in this case."
In this particular case, it’s true, prosecutors are going after Nozette for violations that occurred while they were reeling him in, with a federal agent pretending to be a Mossad officer offering him money (not very much, by the way) in exchange for secrets. The real question, however, is what caused them to zero in on Nozette? A Washington Times piece cites Kenneth Piernick, a former senior FBI agent, who opined:
“He must have made some kind of attempt, which triggered the FBI’s interest in him. They cut in between him and whoever he was trying to work with and posed as an intelligence officer, agent, or courier to handle the issue, and then when he delivered what he intended to deliver to that person, his contact was likely an undercover FBI agent or [someone from] another U.S. intelligence service.”
Yet Nozette may have made more than a mere "attempt." The affidavit alleges that, from 1998 to 2008, he served as a consultant to "an aerospace company wholly owned by the government of Israel," during which time "approximately once a month representatives of the aerospace company proposed questions, or taskings, to Nozette." He answered these questions, and, in return, received regular payments totaling $250,000.
This indicates the Feds had been on to Nozette for quite some time, and with good cause. The affidavit also notes that, at the beginning of this year, he traveled to "a different foreign country" in possession of two computer "thumb" drives, which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared upon his return some three weeks later. What was on the drives – and who were the recipients?
In 2007, federal authorities raided the offices of Nozette’s nonprofit company, the Alliance for Competitive Technology (ACT), purportedly because ACT, having procured several lucrative government contracts, had defrauded the federal government by overcharging. The affidavit cites an anonymous colleague of Nozette who recalled the scientist said that if the U.S. government ever tried to put him in jail he would go to Israel or another foreign country and “tell them everything” he knows.
Perhaps the real reason for the raid, however, had to do with the FBI’s growing suspicion – if not certainty – he was funneling U.S. secrets to Tel Aviv. ACT is a curious creation, a "nonprofit" group that nevertheless generated over half a million dollars last year according to documents filed with the IRS, with over $150,000 in salary and benefits paid out to Nozette. But it wasn’t just about money. ACT’s mission statement reads like a spy’s dream come true:
"The Alliance for Competitive Technology … has been created to serve the national and public interest by conducting scientific research and educational activities aimed at expanding the utilization of National and Government Laboratory resources. The National Laboratories possess significant technology, technologists, and resources, of great potential value to growing U.S. industrial organizations, both small and large. Recent changes in national policy (the Stevenson-Wydler Act of 1986 and the NASA Technology Utilization Program) have sanctioned the pursuit of technology transfer from these organizations. However, the capabilities and resources present in National Laboratories are often difficult to access by small and medium sized organizations with limited resources. ACT will research the best mechanisms to facilitate this transfer through focused research on technology transfer mechanisms, and educational and instructive programs on technology transfer from National Laboratories. In addition, ACT will enable U.S. organizations to utilize the resources of National Laboratories through existing established mechanisms (e.g., the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Technology Affiliates Program).Transfer of commercially valuable technology is significantly enhanced by such direct support of private sector efforts."
In short: ACT is all about technology transfer – from the U.S. to Israel. This, as is well-known, is one of the favored activities of the Israeli intelligence services, which regularly pilfer the latest American technology (especially military applications) to such an extent that a General Accounting Office investigation once characterized the effort as "the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any U.S. ally."
ACT had contracts with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Va., and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It is hardly a leap of faith to conclude that vital data flowing from these projects was fed directly into the waiting maw of the Mossad.
Nozette was a key figure in developing and promoting the "Star Wars" ballistic missile defense system. His colleague in the "High Frontier" movement – and the official director of ACT – is one Klaus Heiss, like Nozette an enthusiast [.pdf] of space colonization (who also has some strong views on other subjects).
Contacted by an FBI agent masquerading as an Israeli intelligence agent, Nozette didn’t blink when told his lunch companion was from the Mossad: "Good," he said. "Happy to be of assistance." This was well before the issue of money was raised. Later in the conversation, Nozette boasted of his top-level security clearances and the range and depth of his knowledge of U.S. secrets, adding, "I don’t get recruited by the Mossad every day. By the way, I knew this day would come." Questioned further by the undercover agent, Nozette said, "I thought I was working for you already. I mean, that’s what I always thought [the foreign company] was – just a front."
Which it no doubt was.
Nozette agreed to be a regular "asset," yet he clearly felt his position was increasingly precarious. He inquired about the right of return and raised the possibility that he might go to Israel. He wanted a passport as part of his payment, in addition to the few thousand dollars the FBI was putting in a post office "dead drop" for him on receipt of stolen secrets.
Well, then, so what? Don’t all nations, even allies, spy on each other? What’s the significance of this particular case?
On the surface, our relationship with Israel is encompassed by the terms of the "special relationship," which has so far consisted of the U.S. giving unconditional support to Tel Aviv’s every action, no matter how brutal [.pdf] or contrary to our interests – and tolerating, to a large degree, its extensive covert operations on U.S. soil (or, at least, keeping quiet about them). On a deeper level, however, the tensions in this one-way love affair have frayed the specialness of the relationship almost to the breaking point.
This is not just due to the election of Barack Obama, who is widely perceived in Israel as being biased against the Jewish state. These tensions arose during Bush’s second term, when U.S. policy began to perceptibly tilt away from Tel Aviv. A particularly telling blow to U.S.-Israeli relations was the decision by the U.S. to clamp down on visa requirements for Israelis entering the U.S.: potential visitors from Israel are now required to undergo an interview, restrictions on their length of stay have been extended, and admission to the U.S. is no longer assured.
In the secret world of spooks spying on one another, the U.S.-Israeli relationship is increasingly adversarial, while in the diplomatic-political realm, it has nearly reached the point of open hostilities. This is thanks to the objective conditions that determine relations among nations: in the post-Cold War world, Israel necessarily became much less of an asset to the U.S. In the post-9/11 world, as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have so trenchantly pointed out, it is an outright liability.
Our self-sacrificial policy of unconditional support for Israel has earned us implacable enemies in the Arab world and granted our adversaries a priceless propaganda prize – and the growing awareness of this disability is something the Israelis no doubt find disturbing. The distortion of our foreign policy by the power of the Israel lobby is also being widely noted, and this is their real Achilles heel.
In this case, too, the Lobby will no doubt rush to exert their influence to downgrade Nozette’s crime and even depict him as an innocent victim of entrapment. Defenders of the AIPAC duo conjured a vast "anti-Semitic" conspiracy within the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI to explain the alleged persecution of Rosen and Weissman, and the same tactics are bound to be trotted out in this instance.
That is nonsense. The FBI didn’t just pick Nozette arbitrarily and conjure his crimes out of thin air. Their target was already deeply involved with the Israelis, and this is what brought him to their attention in the first place.
The nature and extent of Israeli spying in the U.S. is not a subject you’ll see the "mainstream" media very often touch with so much as a 10-foot pole, but when it does the results can be ominously disturbing. I, for one, haven’t forgotten Carl Cameron’s four-part series on Israeli spying in the U.S., broadcast by Fox News in December 2001. According to Cameron, his sources in law enforcement told him the Israelis had been following the 9/11 hijackers and had foreknowledge of their plans but somehow neglected to tell us. And then there were those dancing Israelis, leaping for joy at the sight of the Twin Towers burning…
This is the dark side of the "special relationship," so dark that hardly anyone wants to acknowledge it, let alone consider its implications.
Even as the White House preaches tolerance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practicing intolerance, signaling that anyone who challenges the leaders of an embattled America is cynical, political and -- isn't this the subtext? -- unpatriotic... We should dread a climate where the jobs of columnists and comedians are endangered by dissent.
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, September 30, 2001
That was 2001, the Republicans were in the White House and liberals were busy lecturing us on the dangers of a climate where dissent is considered unpatriotic. Now it's 2009 and the liberals hold Congress and the White House and are busy creating a climate where dissent is un-American and the subtext is... criminal.
Whether it's FOX News or Rush Limbaugh or CNBC-- the Obama Administration has openly and shamelessly targeted dissenting media figures. And even told the press how they were going to do it. And naturally the same defenders of the press who furrowed their brows when Ari Fleischer suggested that maybe an obnoxious comedian should think twice before calling the 9/11 terrorists courageous and the US Air Force cowardly... are cheering the media crackdown on.
Obama's top people did their tour of the Sunday Morning talk shows to spread the message to a cooperative state run media that FOX News was to be sidelined. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, "it's important not to have the CNN's and the others of the world being led and following Fox, as if what they're trying to do is a legitimate news organization."
Had the Bush Administration gotten into the business of deciding that cable news networks with a liberal bias are not legitimate news organizations, the furor would have been endless. And the same columnists repeating the Obama Administration's talking points today, would have been the first to point out that this would mean that the government now gets to decide what a legitimate news network is or isn't, based on its level of favoritism to the White House.
Back in 2005, when the Bush Administration was merely paying less attention to the press and focusing on getting its message out through PR firms, Eric Boehlert at Salon hysterically claimed that this was part of a giant plot by the Bush Administration to destroy the press altogether. Boehlert wrote, "The Bush administration has been at war with the media from Day One. Is its real goal to undermine the press itself -- and thereby eliminate inconvenient truths?..." Boehlert then went on to give a description of the Bush Administration that could all too easily apply to the Obama Administration, "the Bush administration's well-documented mastery of cold-blooded political hardball, its record of contempt for journalism, its cavalier willingness to cross ethical lines in dealing with the press, and its arrogant assertion that it alone creates and controls reality".
But Boehlert's accusations would be far better directed toward the Obama Administration, whose White House Communications Director Anita Dunn gloated publicly;
"Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control... Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why the campaign was saying it. One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters. ... We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it."
There could hardly be a better textbook case of contempt for journalism and arrogance in believing that it and it alone controls reality.
Naturally Boehlert sees no attempt by the Obama White House to create its own reality by trying to intimidate and directly attack media outlets that broadcast reports critical of its policies. These days he works at Media Matters pushing the Obama Administration's segregation of dissenting media outlets line, specifically FOX News. The thinking apparently is that the first step is to prevent any other media outlets from repeating any stories that FOX News breaks. After all nothing can be allowed to interfere with the White House's media echo chamber in which reporters repeat White House talking points to the public and back to the White House again.
That is not journalism. It is very literally propaganda. And calling on the media to segregate dissenting reporters and channels from the propaganda stream is an attempt by a faltering administration to create its own reality in defiance of the actual reality outside. The Obama Administration has tried to create its own economic reality, its own military reality, its own diplomatic reality and above all else, its own spin reality. And to do that, to make sure that the public hears nothing but the White House talking points day in and day out, you need control of the press.
Lenin's technique for seizing power in a city was to first grab the telegraph office in order to be able to control communications, then the electricity to control power, the railway stations to control transportation, the police stations to control enforcement, and ration cards to control food distribution. The first step though was to control communications. And when Anita Dunn, who considers Mao her favorite political philosopher, boasts about the Obama campaign's ability to control the media and feed unfiltered propaganda to he American public... the key word remains, "control".
And the stunning hypocrisy of the media, which repeatedly accused the Bush Administration of suggesting that its dissenters are unpatrotic or unamerican, in turning around now and calling FOX News "unamerican", as Jacob Weisberg does in a Newsweek column, demonstrates not only their bias, but their fundamental lack of standards of any kind. Boehlert and Weisberg and Dowd are not journalists, though they do get up to wave the ink stained flag and salute the masthead at every occasion. Rather they are propagandists willing to say anything to promote whatever the liberal agenda might be at the moment.
If dissent is now unamerican and if repeating the White House's talking points has become the essence of true journalism, then the claims made about the White House during the Bush Administration have finally come true... one administration later.
Source:
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose sweeps have led to allegations of racial profiling, said the rebuff from Washington won't stop him. He said he can still arrest immigrants under a state smuggling law and a federal law that gives all local police agencies more limited power to detain suspected illegal immigrants.
"It doesn't bother me, because we are going to do the same thing," said Arpaio, whose deputies had arrested 16 people by Friday evening on unspecified charges. "I am the elected sheriff. I don't take orders from the federal government."
The officers were participating in a federal program that grants a limited number of local police departments special powers to make immigration arrests and speed up deportation. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stripped Arpaio of his power to let 100 deputies make federal immigration arrests, but renewed another agreement that allows 60 jails officers to determine the immigration status of people in jail.
The sheriff's sweeps in some heavily Latino areas of metro Phoenix have drawn criticism that Arpaio's deputies racially profile people. Arpaio said people pulled over in the sweeps were approached because deputies had probable cause to believe they had committed crimes and that it was only afterward that deputies found many of them were illegal immigrants.
The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Arpaio's office over allegations of discrimination and unconstitutional searches and seizures.
"He is doing this to thumb his nose at the Obama administration," said Lydia Guzman, president of the Hispanic civil rights group Somos America.
The sweeps have discouraged some Hispanics who have witnessed or been victims of crime to refuse to call Arpaio's deputies, for fear of mistreatment, Guzman said.
Observers who are part of Guzman's group fanned out across the area of the sweeps with video cameras to record exchanges between deputies and motorists.
Arpaio said volunteers will use cameras owned by his agency to video-record deputies so viewers can see for themselves that they weren't doing anything wrong. Arpaio responded angrily to a question during a news conference about the costs of the cameras, saying they were paid through seizures in drug cases. "Dope peddlers bought the cameras," Arpaio said.
A dozen anti-Arpaio protesters yelled throughout the news conference. At one point, they chanted: "Order equals K-K-K — here's what Arpaio has to say."
Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and an advocate of expanding local immigration efforts, said Arpaio's office — like every other local police agency — can detain people suspected of immigration violations for a day or two until federal authorities come to pick them up.
In the past, Arpaio could have held such immigrants for longer than two days and conducted investigations of smuggling rings, Kobach said.
"It's really a slight narrowing, but it's not much," said Kobach, who worked as an immigration law adviser to then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft from 2001-2003.
Dan Pochoda, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing people who filed a lawsuit over the sweeps, said Arpaio still can't pull over motorists solely because they are suspected of being illegal immigrants.
"He can't do it under the terms he is claiming. He has indicated that he can stop people without the suspicion, based on what they look like, what they sound like," Pochoda said.
Arpaio said the Bush administration had no complaints about his use of the special federal powers, but all that has changed with the Obama administration.
"What's changed?" Arpaio asked. "Politics has changed, because they don't like us going on the streets to catch illegals."
This round of sweep, Arpaio's 12th, is set to end late Saturday.
In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," tea party activists and town-hall dissenters.
Comes now, the "Oath Keepers." And who might they be?
Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are "either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia."
Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.
"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can't do it without them.
"We say if the American people decide it's time for a revolution, we'll fight with you."
Prediction: Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.
And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-hall protesters, calling them "un-American," "Nazis" and "evil-mongers," one can imagine what they will do with the Oath Keepers.
As with Jimmy Carter's long-range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that these are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president.
Yet, the establishment's reaction seems more problematic for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of America divorced from reality.
Progressives are the folks who, in the 1960s, could easily understand that urban riots that took scores of lives and destroyed billions in property were an inevitable reaction to racism, poverty and despair. They could empathize with the rage of campus radicals who burned down the ROTC building and bombed the Pentagon.
The "dirty, immoral war in Vietnam" explains why the "finest generation we have ever produced" is behaving like this, they said. We must deal with the "root causes" of social disorder.
Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:
"Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year's turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations and the financial industry. ... Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick 'none' – a grim statement."
Is all this due to Obama's race?
Even Obama laughs at that. As he told David Letterman, I was already black by the time I was elected. And he not only got a higher share of the white vote than Kerry or Gore, a third of white voters, who said in August 2008 that race was an important consideration in voting, said they were going to vote for Obama.
With black voters going 24 to 1 for Obama, he almost surely won more votes than he lost because of his race.
Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.
Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.
In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.
They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.
They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.
They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.
America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.
Posts
All Comments
